'The War' that they knew

For much of last week, and into this week, America fought World War II again.

Howard Moore The Pearl Harbor naval yard was set ablaze under a deadly rain of Japanese bombs. Allied troops stormed the beaches at Normandy through withering German gunfire. The hell of Iwo Jima, Saipan and Okinawa was relived.

On the home front, folks rationed everything from food to rubber, cultivated victory gardens, and awaited news of their brothers, sons, husbands and boyfriends from distant points on the globe. Everyone knew someone in uniform, and dreaded the telegram that began with the ominous introduction: "We regret to inform you …"

Mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended it all, and ushered in the nuclear age. Ken Burns' seven-part PBS documentary, "The War," brought millions of viewers back to that time when the U.S. and Allied forces pushed back against Hitler and the Axis powers to preserve a world in danger of being crushed beneath a handful of tyrants. Over the course of 15 hours, the film described the events that battered the planet by focusing on the experiences of people from four American towns and cities, both the men who went over and the families they left behind.

Jim Pratt Among those watching were World War II veterans from the Wachusett area, some who saw duty in the most notorious battle sites during the war. All were appreciative of Burns' efforts to cram four years' worth of material into digestible segments; some were mildly disappointed that certain episodes of the war were given short shrift.

Edward McCarthy of Holden had no plans to watch "The War." He'd already seen it first-hand, through tours in Kwajalein, Saipan, where he nearly lost a foot, and Iwo Jima, where he crawled along a cratered beach in the shadow of Mt. Suribachi - so why subject himself to a rerun? But his wife insisted he join her in front of the television for the series.

Overall, the film did a good job of capturing the history and feel of events, he said. But in a compressed amount of time, the focus was necessarily on the battles, which left gaps when it came to depicting the grunt's experience.

"You get no sense of the lulls," McCarthy said. "Between these intense battles there was so much down time when you were waiting for something to happen. There's a shot in the film of a guy sitting and reading a paperback, and that was one of the great things about the war - the Defense Department was generating books in paperback. I figure that in three operations I traveled 27,000 miles, and I read constantly.

Ed McCarthy "['The War'] did confirm my opinion that I wanted no part of the Italian campaign," he said. "I've been in Italy 10 times, and I've seen the terrain that those men had to deal with in battle. Thank God I was in the Pacific."

Steve Nowak of Holden was serving aboard the U.S.S. Franklin when it was attacked by Japanese planes on March 19, 1945. The ship was rocked with explosions and set ablaze, killing nearly 1,000 men. In terms of human loss, it was the worst sea disaster in U.S. military history.

Nowak watched the series in pieces, and said the footage of Hitler's military rallies remains chilling.

"My god, that's frightening to look at. It looked like his army covered four square miles," he said.

While he thought the program has been slow moving at times (a common complaint), it did capture the frenzy surrounding the declaration of war after Pearl Harbor. Nowak recalls that "any man older than the age of 20 disappeared from town within weeks after war was declared. I tried to sign up for the Navy when I was 16, but I was turned down. At 17, I joined the Marine Corps."

Ed Duane viewed "The War" with two sets of eyes: those of a veteran and an historian. The local expert on Paxton history who served in a support unit on D-Day, saw parts of the series he found "very interesting, very good," yet was hoping for more thorough coverage of the D-Day invasion. Duane notes that the 101st Airborne and the 1st Division weren't mentioned, yet took "an awful beating" in the battle.

"[Burns] did a good job, especially since he had a lot of ground to cover," Duane said. He believes the film can open the eyes of younger generations about how World War II affected the entire nation at that time - scarcely a family was untouched in some way - and he laments the lack of education about the war that kids are receiving in the classroom.

"It's important to realize how fortunate we are that, besides Pearl Harbor, the war wasn't fought here," he said. "I wonder how people here would have reacted if they endured what the British did."

Fellow Paxtonite Howard Moore returned a reporter's call after returning from lunch with a group of friends who call themselves Retired Old Men Eating Out, or ROMEO for short. The men, who dine together every two weeks, are all WWII generation, most are veterans, and all had been watching "The War" faithfully.

"That's all we talked about the entire lunch," Moore said last Thursday, after three episodes had been aired. "The consensus is, he's doing a very good job."

The native Virginian was 17 years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and few short years later the young seaman was aboard a ship nicknamed "Gizmo" at the siege of Okinawa. His two brothers, one a Marine who stormed the beach and the other a Navy personnel aboard an aircraft carrier, also were there. All escaped without a scratch.

Moore likes the way Burns captured the effect of the war on regular citizens. He recently returned to his alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School, and was stunned to see the roll call of those who had been killed in action from his class of 1941.

"These weren't football players, athletes. They were plain old guys; a real cross-section of the class," he said. "Everyone was hurt by that war."

His own brothers made it home - the Marine surviving five invasions and several injuries - but they both recently died, two of the estimated 1,000 WWII veterans who die each day.

When he spoke to a reporter last week, Jim Pratt of Sterling was still waiting to see how Burns dealt with the development and dropping of the atom bomb. As a member of the construction battalion known as the Seabees, Pratt helped turn the island of Tinian into an airfield where the Enola Gay would take off with her nuclear payload bound for Hiroshima, and, later, the Bocks Car, with the Nagasaki bomb.

He'd seen parts of "The War" - the Anzio beachhead and Guadalcanal segments - and proclaimed them "fantastic."

"I've seen other documentaries before, but the film footage he's uncovered is incredible," Pratt said.

Ed McCarthy respects the fact that Burns chose to view the war "from the ground up" rather than through the eyes of those who planned the invasions.

"It's a formidable task," he said.

"I like that he included some of the mistakes that were made that cost so many lives. Those were part of the war, too," he added, noting the devastation at the battle for Pelalu.

The human cost on both sides became evident to the soldiers on the battlefield. McCarthy remembers coming upon a hastily evacuated Japanese encampment at Saipan.

"We found snapshots and photo albums of families," he said. "It was the first indication that these weren't animals we were fighting, but people with families. It was a little unsettling."

As he watched a retrospective of one war, McCarthy has been monitoring the U.S. military's present day struggles against an elusive enemy in the Middle East.

"I was in World War II, but I can't say I'd want to be in Iraq," he said. "At least we knew who the guys with the bayonets were."